


The Halloween Heist

by burglebezzlement



Category: Castle
Genre: Art Crime, Content warning for references to past familial abuse and murder in the context of a case, Extra Trick, Gen, Ghosts, Halloween, ToT: Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-23 07:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8319799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: Thirty years ago, on Halloween, thieves robbed a gallery on the Upper West Side. When Alexis Castle decides to try to unravel the mystery, she may uncover something — or someone — she’s not looking for.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



> I couldn't resist a request for an old-fashioned ghost story in the Castle universe. Happy Trick or Treat!

A cold, October-y rain fell outside the windows of Castle Investigations. The wind gusted and drops rattled against the windows as Alexis looked out onto the street below. She had a long, dark day ahead of her, with nothing to do except hang out in the Castle Investigations office. 

When Alexis spotted Hayley on the sidewalk, she jumped up to meet her at the door.

“And you people say the weather in London is miserable,” Hayley said, coming inside and shaking the water off her coat. “Did your father leave something for me?”

Alexis grabbed the file folder from the desk and handed it over. “As promised.”

Hayley set her luggage down and opened the folder. “Excellent.” 

Overcoat, luggage — “You’re off to the airport, aren’t you?” Hayley asked.

“Headed back to Merry Olde England,” Hayley said without looking up from the folder. “Meeting with one of my insurance clients. Why do you ask?”

Alexis shrugged. It wasn’t like she expected Hayley to hang out with her, but — her father and Kate were off on an island somewhere, relaxing (or knowing them, getting into a murder-y type of trouble). Her grandmother was somewhere in upstate New York, teaching a masterclass to a group of impressionable young actors. And now Hayley was headed out of town.

Maybe Alexis was bored. Or maybe it was loneliness. It wasn’t like she had expected her dad to stick around for Halloween. Heck, Alexis had been the one to opt out from their family Halloween traditions first. But….

“What do you do?” Alexis asked, impulsively. “Between cases.”

Hayley smiled. “There is no between cases.” She pulled a thumb drive out of her bag and tossed it to Alexis.

“What is this?” 

Hayley raised an eyebrow. “Put it in a computer and find out.”

The thumb drive opened to a directly of folders. They were organized by year, with a name given after the year for each folder.

“Cold cases.” Hayley looked over Alexis’s shoulder. “Any time I get bored, I pull these out. There’s a billion dollars in potential insurance fraud, theft, and other property crime in those folders.”

Alexis scanned through. Manet, Renoir — she’d heard of a lot of the artists before. She looked at a folder with a date in the early 1980s, labeled as Halloween Heist. 

“I wasn’t even alive for some of these,” Alexis said.

Hayley shrugged. “The insurance company representing that case retains title. You find the paintings, even thirty years later, you get the reward.”

“So why show me this?”

“You said you were bored. You want to poke around on some of these for me?”

* * *

The file on the Halloween Heist was short: just a few pages of Hayley’s notes and some pdfs of investigation reports from the original crime.

One Halloween night, before Alexis was even born, three masked men broke into the Svane Gallery on the Upper West Side. They killed the gallery assistant, slashed the paintings on display out of their frames while ignoring much more valuable paintings kept in a back room, and took off into the night, never to be seen again. The artist, Preston Gillies, died not long after the heist.

The file included a few grainy photocopies of the paintings. Primitive oil paintings, but there was a power to them — something about the overgrown rocks and buildings. 

Outsider art, Alexis figured. Popular back in the 1980s. She turned to Hayley’s estimate of the current value of the paintings and whistled. Not bad, for an artist she’d never heard of before opening this file. 

She poked around on the internet for a bit, looking for a clue, but there wasn’t much out there. A few blog posts, one of them claiming that the gallery was haunted. A few more with theories about the crime.

One of the blog posts included a color picture of one of the paintings. Alexis’s first impression was green — it looked like a jungle ruin, but as Alexis looked closer, she saw gaps in the vines and leaves. Windows, maybe, in an old, overgrown mansion.

As she stared, the windows started to shift. Was that a face, in the top window? She peered closer, but the resolution on the photograph wasn’t high enough to let her see. 

Creepy. Alexis shivered and shut down the computer.

* * *

Alexis took the subway uptown, to the old gallery space. By the time she got there, dark had already set in. 

The gallery was a few blocks away from the subway, set into the first commercial space fronting on a side street. It still operated under the original name — Svane Gallery — but when Alexis pushed inside, she noticed that the interior was completely different. Instead of the dark walls and heavy wood trim from the crime scene photographs, the gallery had white walls and LED lighting.

The darkness outside pressed up against the windows as Alexis wandered through the current show. _Memories of Futures Past_ — a collection of abstracts, blocky black shapes on gossamer shades of white and pearl. Alexis stood in front of one of the paintings and looked, the way her mom taught her to look at art, giving it time to develop, to grow on her, but the suggestive billowing of the white paint stayed still. Dead.

A girl about Alexis’s age looked up when Alexis approached the desk. She was dressed in black, with a pair of vintage plastic glasses frames and mousy-colored hair pulled back into a long braid.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Just looking,” Alexis said, glancing around the gallery.

“You’re here about the Halloween heist, aren’t you?”

Alexis felt her cheeks flush. “How could you tell?”

“We usually get a couple people around this time of year,” the girl said. She studied Alexis for a moment. “Do you want the full story?”

“Of course I do,” Alexis said eagerly. “Why, do you know something?”

“Maybe,” the girl said. She looked toward the back room. “You want to go somewhere else and talk?”

* * *

There was a Starbucks around the corner. Alexis held the door open for the girl from the gallery. She wasn’t wearing a coat — “I don’t feel the cold,” she’d said when Alexis asked if she needed to get anything before they left. 

Inside, the Starbucks was cheery with seasonal signs advertising Pumpkin Spice Lattes and the smell of coffee. Alexis offered to buy something, but the girl waved her off. “I’m fine. I’ll go get us a table.”

Alexis bought a soy hot chocolate and a couple cookies, in case the girl changed her mind about food. When she got to the table, the girl was sitting in the far chair, staring out at the wind-driven rain on the dark sidewalk outside.

“I didn’t even introduce myself.” Alexis lowered the hot chocolate and cookies to the table and sat down. “I’m Alexis Castle.”

“Ronnie,” the girl said. She didn’t reach out to shake Alexis’s hand.

“So how long have you been working at the Svane Gallery?” 

“It feels like forever sometimes,” Ronnie said. “I’ve heard all the old stories. This used to be a pretty bad neighborhood, back then.”

Alexis took notes in her phone while Ronnie told her about it. New York in the 1980s — the conflicts between the gentrifiers in the Upper West Side and the long-term residents.

“This wasn’t a hot neighborhood back then,” Ronnie said. “Mr. Svane founded this place. He had to work to get artists in those days. He didn’t normally work with outsider art, but he thought Gillies had something.” She looked at Alexis. “He was probably right — Gillies’ stuff was powerful. Upsetting, though. You looked at his paintings for long enough, stuff would start crawling out at you.”

“You sound like you’ve seen some of them,” Alexis said. Based on the file, it had sounded like almost all of Gillies’ paintings had been stolen the night of the heist. 

“There’s still a few around,” Ronnie said. 

“So Gillies,” Alexis said. “Why him? He wasn’t famous or anything.”

“He was going to be. Like I said. He was pretty good.”

“So someone decided to, what, steal the paintings and hang on to them? How could they sell them?”

“That’s the thing,” Ronnie said. She leaned forward on her chair. “The police figured that. But the theft had nothing to do with the value of the paintings.”

“What was it about?”

“What was in them,” Ronnie said. She pointed at Alexis’s folder. “You have copies?”

“Just of a few of them,” Alexis said, hurrying to pull the grainy images out of the folder. She set them on the table in front of them. The top image showed a human skull being swallowed by dark earth. 

“This was his sister,” Ronnie said.

“His —” Alexis felt her stomach churn. “Wait, how do you know that?”

“He told us,” Ronnie said. “At the Svane Gallery, I mean. He told Mr. Svane.” She looked back down at the pictures. “She’s in the paintings of the house, too, hidden in the windows. That’s the real reason the paintings were stolen. He was going to be famous, and people were going to start asking questions about who the girl in the windows was. His family tracked him down and stole the paintings to keep that secret.”

Alexis thought of the painting she’d seen online — the house overgrown with green vines, and just the barest idea of someone looking out of the windows.

The feeling of being trapped. _Art makes you feel something_ , she thought, thinking of her mom’s gallery tours when she was a kid.

“That’s horrible,” she said, looking down at another painting of a crow sitting beneath a flowering bush with dark flowers.

Ronnie shrugged. “That’s art.”

“So the paintings?”

“Destroyed,” Ronnie said. “As soon as they left the gallery. And now nobody will ever know, except me.” She smiled at Alexis. “And now, you.”

* * *

Hayley arrived back in the Castle Investigations office on Halloween afternoon. Alexis got her up to date on everything — the smuggling ring her dad and Kate cracked on their relaxing island vacation, and the latest Castle Investigations case.

“I cracked your art heist, too,” Alexis said. “Bad news, though. The paintings were destroyed.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Hayley asked. 

“I went down there,” Alexis said. “Wait, was I not supposed to?”

“No,” Hayley said, “it’s perfectly fine, but — I’ve been tracking this case for years. There’s never been a hint of anything about what happened to those paintings.”

“They were covering up evidence.” 

Alexis told Hayley the whole story. Meeting Ronnie. Preston Gillies, and his art, and his sister.

When she finished, she was surprised to see that Hayley looked pale.

“Alexis, there’s never been any indication of any of this. Mr. Svane was interviewed by the police at the time, and he never told them this. Nor did he tell any of the insurance investigators.”

“I swear it’s what she told me,” Alexis said. “We can go back. If Ronnie’s still there, I bet she’ll tell you all about it.”

Hayley took a deep breath. “That’s the other thing. The gallery assistant who was killed in the robbery? Her name was Veronica Stubbard.”

* * *

When they arrived near the gallery, it was almost dark, and the neighborhood teemed with little kids in costumes, and their parents. Alexis dodged a Princess Elsa and a Hulk who were barreling down the sidewalk, ignoring everything else in their pursuit of candy. It was a superhero and princess-heavy crowd, Alexis decided. No ghosts in sight.

“Right in here,” Hayley said, pulling Alexis around the corner and into the Svane Gallery.

A young man with thick black glasses stood behind the counter. “Can I help you?” he asked without looking up.

“We’re looking for Ronnie,” Alexis said.

At that, he looked up. “Nobody by that name works here. Sorry.”

“But —” Alexis backed up a step. “I was here. I talked to her.”

“Don’t know what to tell you,” the man said. “Look, it’s Halloween and I need to get out of here before the wanna-be ghost hunters arrive.”

“Right,” Alexis said. The stories, online, about the gallery being haunted. 

She turned and felt a chill run up her spine. In the darkness of the open doorway into the backroom, Alexis thought she saw a face in the doorway, a face wearing big plastic glasses. 

“Hayley,” Alexis said, her voice quiet.

But by the time Hayley turned to look, the face was gone.


End file.
